As your blog host, I look forward to sharing stories, opinions, facts, myths – whether significant or irrelevant – from and about the world of music past, present, and future – a world that you are a part of. The blog title, Learn Globally, Listen Locally, especially as it relates to the Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival, will become clear as more posts are added over time.​

To attempt to define “the world of music” would be as impossible as trying to define music itself. But we might try to understand it indirectly by pointing and suggesting rather than attempting to nail it down with a definition. Here are three suggestions from names you will all recognize:​

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

A musical thought is one spoken by a mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart of the thing; detected the inmost mystery of it, namely the melody that lies hidden in it; the inward harmony of coherence which is its soul, whereby it exists, and has a right to be, here in this world. ... The primal element of us; of us, and of all things. The Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies: it was the feeling they had of the inner structure of Nature. ... See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it.– Carlyle

Confucius (551-479 BC)

Do you think that there must be the movements of the performers in taking up their positions, the brandishing of the plumes and fifes, the sounding of the bells and drums before we can speak of music? To speak and carry into execution what you have spoken is ceremony; to act without effort or violence is music.​– Confucius

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

The grain of sand, tightly sealed as it is, needs the damp, electric warm soil in order to sprout, to think, to express itself. ... Music relates the spirit to harmony. An isolated thought yet feels related to all things that are of the mind: likewise every thought in music is intimately, indivisibly related to the whole of harmony, which is oneness. All that is electrical stimulates the mind to musical, flowing, surging creation. I am electrical by nature.​– Beethoven

The first quote is from Thomas Carlyle’s series of lectures, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, the second is from Confucius’ Analects. The third quote, the words of Beethoven, survive thanks to the correspondence, diary, and memoire of a young woman whom, accurately or not, I like to think of as history’s first “flower child,” Bettina von Arnim née Brentano. Her contemporaries called her Schwärmerin– dreamer, visionary, sentimentalist, zealot. She called herself Mignon, after the orphan girl in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. She had very close relationships with Beethoven, Goethe and other major players in the Romantic Age. If she were alive today, her Facebook page would read, “Family and Relationships: It’s complicated.” Part of her story will be told in a blog post coming soon.​